Windows Solutions

After installing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (Build 1709) on my PC, all my network connections–whether wired or wireless–were broken. When I checked the device manager I had an exclamation mark against all but one network device. The only device excluded from error was the “Check Point Virtual Network Adapter”.

Going into the properties of one of these devices gave equally cryptic errors. All devices reported the same thing.

Windows is still setting up the class configuration for this device. (Code 56)

A couple extra reboots did not resolve the odd error either.

A quick search on the internet revealed forum postings that identified the Check Point VPN as the culprit (credit SOHIC for the answer). This made sense as the version of the Check Point software I had made no mention that it was supported on Windows 10. My bad!

When installing the Fitbit app on Windows Phone 10 you may receive an error. When you click the See Details link, it details that something unexpected happened and provides error code 0x8007000B. The error also instructs that waiting a bit or restarting your device might help. Unfortunately, neither of these recommendations will solve your problem.

The error code is a result of how you have configured your Windows phone to store applications. If your phone has an SD Card and you have configured this as your default location for application installs then this is your problem. The Fitbit app will only install to your phones internal storage.

This error is caused when you have a mix of differently licensed Office products on your computer. For example, you may have Office 365 ProPlus which is the click-to-run version that operates off a subscription. On the same computer, you may also have a volume licensed Office product, such as Visio or Project, that may have been delivered by ISO or MSI. If this is the case you will constantly receive this nag message from OneDrive for Business. This will likely also cause transfer issues if you are using sync libraries.

Unfortunately, the only way to remedy this is to uninstall either one of the competing products (or remove OneDrive for Business). In probably all cases I would expect the Office 365 suite to be the victor. That said you will need to license the offending software–Visio or Project–through an Office 365 subscription.

Not good news I’m afraid. I doubt Microsoft will remedy this as I suspect all products will eventually become a subscription. But this is the fix.

Recently I was trying to change the primary email address on my Skype account. The challenge? When I tried to change the primary email address I kept getting an invalid password prompt.

Oops, that wasn’t the right password. Try again.

I spent an hour going round in circles with Skype Live Chat support. Eventually, I was told that because it was linked to my Microsoft account I could not change my primary email address. I was told that the only option was to delete and recreate my Skype account.

The challenge with that option is that I would lose my Skype number (which was also on my business cards). Support informed me that a Skype number could not be transferred between accounts.

I was in a quandary. On the one hand, my old email was going away. If Skype would not let me change my primary email address, then I now had a security problem should anyone else pick up that email address. If I did recreate my account, then I had the challenge of potentially losing my business phone number.

The issue was around my wife’s PC. Her PC is almost 5 years old–it still performs incredibly well. That is one of the benefits of building a custom PC.

When you build a custom PC it’s not about saving money but getting more bang for your buck. If I were to give a PC manufacturer $1000 versus what I could do with $1000 myself the difference would be night and day. You’d think an economy of scale would kick in somewhere, but it doesn’t. If you can build your own, I recommend it.

With her PC still running Windows 7, it was time for an upgrade. I knew I wanted to take her to Windows 8.1. I figured if I was going to do a full reload, why not upgrade to a solid-state drive at the same time. Kill two birds with one stone. So I did.

The Problem

Everything went well enough at first. The BIOS recognized the new drive. I threw in my Windows 8.1 DVD and the OS installed like a charm.

But then I started to encounter peculiar symptoms. The PC would randomly reboot every few hours.

I checked the Event Logs. Sadly, they were devoid of any real clues. Aside from the Unexpected Shutdown messages, there was nothing else that would lead me in the right direction.

I quickly found no dumps were being created either. This was not good.

I disabled automatic restart and received the following error the next time it occurred.

I ran into a strange error recently on an Exchange 2013 server. The WWW Publishing Service was stopped. When I tried to start the service it failed on a dependency. A quick check revealed the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) was stopped. When I tried to start WAS, I received the following error.

Windows could not start the Windows Process Activation Service service on Local Computer. Error 13: The data is invalid.

The Event Viewer was littered with equally cryptic Event IDs, such as WAS 5005 and WAS 5036.

If you are missing the pictures of the icons in Remote Desktop Services Web Access, but you can still see the icon text, then it is a compatibility issue with Internet Explorer 10.

While there appears to be no actual fix there is a very easy workaround. Simply switch your RDS Web Access portal page into compatibility mode.

You can do this by clicking the icon of the torn page in Internet Explorer’s Address Bar. The page will reload in compatibility mode and you should now have matching pictures to go with the text descriptions. As long as you don’t clear your browser cache, Internet Explorer will remember the compatibility mode setting.

I ran into an issue recently where Thin Clients were connecting to a Server 2008 R2 RDS Farm. The RDS Farm had three Sessions Hosts and one Connection Broker. DNS was providing round–robin and the Connection Broker was providing load balancing.

The issue we were facing was that the Thin Clients were experiencing a double logon. When they connected they would logon, and immediately after they hit enter, they were given a second logon. It almost seemed like it was rejecting their password. But it wasn’t. They would retype their credentials and get in and continue on.